mars4

A few miles west of the face, directly in the line created by the two
eye sockets, are some pyramidal features that seem almost to be
arranged there. Another larger pyramidal shape ten miles southeast of
the face has five distinct, symmetrical ridges leading to an apex, with
features along the ridges that strongly resemble buttressing. West of
the pyramidal shapes is a remarkably straight wall with two clean
angles and a table extending from it in a very clean semicircle. About
25 miles nearly due east of the face is a wall that has somehow been
raised in the ejecta blanket of a crater. Because the ejecta pattern is
undisturbed underneath and behind the wall, it's clear that the wall
rose after the crater was formed. No known geological process
accounts for the wall's presence.
A number of reputable scientists and imaging specialists made
extensive, detailed investigations of the photos, and concluded there
was more evidence to suggest the Cydonia features are artificial than
there is to suggest they are natural. Using the same methods as
archaeoastronomers, the investigators noted recurring architectonic
symmetries and geometrical relationships in and between the features
which strongly resemble or are identical to architectural geometries
used by humans. One investigator claimed that an observer looking
due east across the line of the face's eyes on the morning of the
Martian solstice about 330,000 years ago, would have seen the Sun
rise directly over the wall at the edge of the crater. From a scene like
this, we can imagine -- maybe not a civilization of Martians, given the
unlikelihood of Mars' evolving complex biota of its own, but instead a
civilization of aliens who colonized Mars for a time and built huge
monuments, including a mile-long human face and a sort of
Stonehenge on a massive scale.
Now, there are only two possible explanations for these peculiar
images. One is that they are unusually eroded rock formations. The
other is that they are artificial structures.
NASA and others like Sagan informed the scientific community for
nearly two decades that the features are natural - the formations are
tricks of light and shadow playing over rock formations with unusual
and highly unlikely erosion features. As long as the formations can be
explained in terms of processes we already know about, Carl Sagan
told one reporter, there is no need to invoke an explanation including
alien or Martian construction crews. The scientific community mainly
accepted this conventional skepticism, even though all the time it was
being purveyed, no investigation had offered any support for it.
We entertain the hope that there is other life in the universe, but we
keep the hope and the possibilities safely inside the boundaries of our
own terms. Although they are very hard to pin down, we have very
strict notions about how Mars might be enlivened and how not.
Robots do not enliven anything; they give reports. They tell us what is
on the surface of Mars - rock, dust, gas and frost. A robot, naturally,
detects and reports only what it is programmed to detect and report.
Mars 3 detected a planetwide dust storm. Viking I detected a mesa
with a weird erosion pattern: Mars Global Surveyor's much
higher-resolution camera in 1998 revealed in Mars' Cydonia region, at
about 41 north latitude, 10 west longitude, a large outcropping of rock
which only the most diehard Face on Mars proponents have continued
to believe might be artificial. Robots do not find architecture. They
find rocks and chemicals.
I wonder what the Martian astronauts will find.

* * *

The sky will be a funny salmon or ochre color, like perpetual sunset.
The rocks and sand will be reddish. The weather will be ominously
predictable because the Martian trade winds are very regular,
monotonously coming and going in two or three day cycles. The only
uncertainty will be the time of the massive dust storm.
For any astronaut who lets them steep too long in his or her thoughts,
the superficial geologic features will be disquieting because of their
immensity and stillness. Mars has only about a tenth the mass of the
Earth, but its fractal dimension is about 2.4 compared to Earth's 2.1,
which means the surface is more rutted and pointy and therefore, as
the orbiters have revealed, gigantic. Valles Marineris, a chain of
canyons like the Grand Canyon, stretches across the middle of Mars as
long as the United States is wide. In a region of tremendous dead
volcanic peaks west of the Viking I lander, Olympus Mons is over 25
miles high. A cliff a mile and more in height divides the planet roughly
in half in a circle inclined about 35 degrees to the equator. If Mars had
an ocean, most of the northern hemisphere would be under water and
the southern hemisphere would be a continent. The mouths of dry
riverbeds open out of the cliff as though titanic rivers once surged like
perpetual tsunamis from the south to the north. The mouths of the
Amazon and Mississippi are like coves in comparison.
It all sits huge and motionless to the eye of an astronaut. Even on the
smallest scale, blocky, rust-colored rocks are as fixed as photographs.
Their stillness causes even rocks a few feet away to seem remote;
spatial relations are unclear despite the acute visual clarity. Mars is a
frieze of its own time. If you were standing in that moment,
uncertainly figuring distances, waves of Martian snapshots might
invade your mind from years of preparation. The maps and orbiter
photos of dry river channels, fretted terrain and mesas, sand and
desert might imbricate your actual visual impressions. Round craters
and splashlike circles of frozen mud that oozed and burped before

it settled. Conelike mounds. Dead volcanoes that blasted smoke and
ash for millions of Martian years, and vents that simply bled up lavas
and coated the plains. The cliffs of massive gorges.
Remembering pictures distances you from the desert by another
whole dimension, as though you were standing on a circle and the
photo-images folded it and you backwards onto a line. Your
recollections, in other words, reduce your boundaries to the stillness
of a line, and you see what's directly before you only in terms of what
your training has prepared you to see.
You kick some dust up with your boot and watch it filter through the
air and settle in your tracks. Carbon dioxide. Oxidized minerals.
Beyond Big Joe is the fort-like pile of blocky rocks. And now only a
few hundred miles northeast, Cydonia images, photographed by robot,
appear in your mind, the rock that looks like a face, a rock that looks,
its eyes stare outward into space. Westerly, out of range, is Sagan
Memorial Station where Mars Pathfinder touched down and sent out
the Rover.
You touch a glove to Viking's strut. In the moment before you turn to
walk across your latticed tracks, a glimmer appears in the orange air,
like a mirage leaping the horizon on an ice-cloud. A momentary
silence in your headset compounds the frieze. You hear your
breathing.
Across unmoving undulations of red desert, is the horizon. Mars is
smaller than the Earth, and like the Apollo astronauts seeing the
literal curve of the lunar surface, you think you see the planet's surface
bow. Through the thin air, asteroid-shaped rocks diminish like rusty
whitecaps farther and farther away. They incline slightly out and
downward like snowflakes bending through the headlights and
windshield of a speeding car. They are stillness in motion. The hills
might be hypnotic if they moved.
The Sun lowers onto the horizon. The sky fades, turns orange, and
seems to grow around you. Everything is big, as twilight emerges from
the dusty air. Your eye struggles to pick up a familiar object -- rocks
and sand, a mote of dust, the glimmer of an evening star -- but falters.
The Martian dusk is faintly nasturtium-colored and unnatural, and
moves in the bootprints that crisscross the dirt. Little ridges lay purple
shadows in the hollows, and Viking with its dusty antenna dish
opening throws darkness over the prints. The boulder's shadow bends
across the rubble toward you.
The sunlight contracts to reddish-ochre, and the evening rocks
become ellipsoids. Instead of lengthening, their shadows inflate, they
turn the gritty sand a dull magenta. The sand once crawled with
microbes. It's unearthly, as if the Martian fossils teemed and the
topsoil swelled outward to the horizon, and the horizon itself
dissolved in the stars. The stars are bursting through the ceiling, and
the great precession unfolds out of the tilt and wobble of Mars on its
axis in a funnel of starlight. The horizon drains into the ochre dust,
and you see with alarm, as if some movement had awakened you from
sleep in a strange room, what neither Mariner nor Viking nor Surveyor,
nor any unmanned robot saw on Mars at all.
As though the planet had violated your eyes the entire periphery of
your vision clears. The rock-fort, boulder, landing craft and sand
beyond, the blackening eastern sky and Viking and the reddening west
converge in a single spherical apparition, as if your eyes surrounded
your head and rotated with the planet. The horizon disappears, its
boundary dissolves into stars the way interstellar distances enfold
themselves in time. Everything around you, every star and mote of
dust, is a single uncut instant, and the whole of everything is visibly in
motion, and feels like solid ground beneath your feet. Mars
encompasses and grips you in its frieze like an oceanic flow. Like the
pierce a single sound would make through Martian silence, every piece
of grit and curve of space is full. Mars itself, and the universe, and
everything in it, are alive.